European Trash, American Treasure: Gun Entrepreneurs and the US Consumer Market for Firearms After 1945

Histories of guns in the United States often assume a kind of static supply and demand over time: Americans have always desired firearms, and a bountiful market and few laws have always met their desires. Such an assumption belies the realities of the various ebbs and flows of both gun supply and demand over time as well as the agency of individuals and corporate entities in making and remaking the gun market. Gun entrepreneurs have remade the U.S. firearms market several times over since the mid-nineteenth century, when wily capitalists like Samuel Colt and Oliver Winchester first invented a national civilian market through modern techniques of mass production and marketing. The most significant transformation, this paper argues, occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War, when a new generation of young gun capitalists connected U.S. consumer demand with a fresh supply of war-surplus firearms from Europe.

Tens of millions of firearms lay in European warehouses when the war ended. European governments were unlikely to sell or distribute them to their own populations, and they were expensive to guard and maintain. A handful of U.S. gun entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to turn Europe’s wartime trash into Americans’ postwar treasure. In the two decades after the war’s end, they bought up millions of these arms for pennies on the dollar and sold them to U.S. consumers for a fraction of the price of a new rifle from a traditional U.S. gun manufacturer. The result was the rapid expansion of the gun consumer market, bringing in millions of new gun buyers and transforming U.S. gun culture into one privileging unlimited market access to cheap firearms above all else.